📺 Watch This: How Grade Impacts Readability

One of the most inspiring things about working on Material Design is seeing how UX Researchers uncover the ways that design interacts with its users.

In this video, which was part of the proceedings of ACM's Conference on Human Factors in Computing in 2023, the team unpacks their findings about how grade adjustments (in other words adjusting the font's weight without affecting its metrics) impact readability in a variety of settings.

For those not familiar, "human factors" in HCI generally refers to the capabilities of humans to interact with a machine—perception, cognition, motor function, etc.—so finding out whether grade adjustments make a difference for perception (in this case readability) is a juicy task.

I won't give away all the findings here—watch the video or read the paper for that—but I will say they're thought-provoking, drawing connections between ink spread in print and light bleed on digital displays, and challenging to my assumptions about readability in dark mode.

You can read the full paper on the ACM Digital Library, or an overview on the Material Blog.